Mass media wield power that reinforces prejudice

One false move, Erik Taylor thought as he clutched the steering wheel, and I'm a dead man.

"This guy was hitting the horn," the 23-year-old Lakeview resident recalled, "and I looked behind me, and here he is just throwing the finger at me. I just bit my tongue and kept on driving. I didn't even look at him. Because the first thing I thought, if I were to react to it? He was going to pull a gun and start shooting."

Taylor is white. The man behind him was black. To Taylor, the distinction was critical. Had the driver been white, he said, "I probably would've said, 'Kiss my aQ!' " Instead, Taylor did what many white people do when encountering people of color: He assumed the worst.

"We've grown accustomed to it on TV," he said. "Black people hate white people."

*******

Like a lot of children growing up in the '70s and '80s, Tamiko Allen spent most of her days and nights in the company of television characters. But she didn't care for the people on the screen who were black, like her.

" 'Good Times,' 'What's Happening!!' - I hated that," she said. "I just hated the way they talked, and the way they depicted me - all the yelling, just out of control.

"I wanted to be white. I wanted to be Marcia Brady (from "The Brady Bunch"). To me, that was what everyone should be.

"Everyone on television who was happy seemed to be white."

*******

As the editor in chief of Essence magazine, Susan L. Taylor spends her days chronicling the accomplishments of a vast array of African-American achievers. Doctors. Lawyers. Scientists. Business executives. Artists. Educators. Politicians.

But when she goes home at night and turns on the evening news, Taylor sees a considerably narrower spectrum of black people. Murderers. Drug pushers. Muggers. Rapists. Victims of crime, poverty, urban neglect.

Taylor knows her magazine, in many ways, is fighting a losing battle. She knows what goes through the minds of the tens of millions of people who watch those newscasts every night.

"They think of crime, poverty and public education, and the faces have been painted black," she said.

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Erik Taylor's anxiety. Tamiko Allen's self-loathing. Susan Taylor's despair. Each is an example of the many subtle but profound ways that the media can and do affect how people, white and black, feel about themselves, and each other.

RACE POLL: In The Times-Picayune, is the coverage of black people too positive, too negative, or about right?

White

Black

Too positive

9%

5%

Too negative

18%

55%

About right

57%

30%

Don't know

16%

10%

About the poll: The Times-Picayune surveyed 700 area residents about racial attitudes May 3-24, 1993. The poll was designed and analyzed by Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago. Polling was conducted by Silas Lee and Associates of New Orleans. Results will appear periodically as part of The Times-Picayune's special report, 'Together Apart: The myth of race.' Margin of sampling error: +/-5 percent for results from white people, +/-6 percent for those from black people, because more white people than black people were surveyed. Margin of error predicts the possible variance between the actual views in the metropolitan area and the poll results.

The effect, communications and mental health experts say, has been largely negative. For all its potential to do good, the mass media Q the most powerful cultural forces in the world Q have advanced racial stereotypes and double standards. They have subconsciously pointed TV watchers and newspaper and magazine readers toward one inescapable conclusion: that black people are inferior to white people.

"This is important not only in the formation of the identity of blacks, but also white people as they think of blacks," said DuBois Williams, who teaches a course in black psychology at Xavier University.

White people "take back an affirmation of what they suspected all along," she said, especially if they have little day-to-day contact with African-Americans.

For black people, however, "It's a divisive thing . . . it puts a person of color in a position of defensiveness Q always having to climb first, or climb higher, or scratch better," Williams, who is black, said.

Television news and entertainment have by far the greatest effect on attitudes, but all the media - broadcast, print and film - contribute to the problem, sociologists say.

And a formidable problem it is. A 1992 study of media consumption by communications investment bankers Veronis, Suhler & Associates showed that a typical person spends almost nine hours a day using some form of media. Not surprisingly, television accounted for most of that - as much time as people spend with radio, recorded music, newspapers, books, magazines, videotapes and theatrical movies combined.

Speaking of Race

You have to be careful about the images you're presenting. I'll give you an example. A reporter once did a story about reaction to the Mardi Gras ordinance. So this reporter, to get the white side of the story, went to Metairie Country Club. And to get the black side of the story, he went to interview a janitor and a cab driver and those people who drive the carriages in the French Quarter. Now, what's wrong with that picture? What type of people typically patronize the Metairie Country Club? Well-educated people, more than likely. If you're very poor, you can't really play golf a lot, right? So you've probably got affluent, well-connected people. They're going to be articulate, they're going to be thoughtful more often than not. So then you find the least articulate, least informed and least educated to represent the black side. That was the reporter's perception of what black is. He didn't go to Eastover Country Club, where you find well-to-do, educated, articulate blacks. Black reporters do the same thing - black reporters do not try to find an articulate black person to make a point. They operate on the same perception. Because it's an institutional, cultural, societal condition. We still use race to define people. Still. I recall an experience in Washington. We were the only black family in the neighborhood. And the neighbors' kids would always call their neighbors "Mr. So-and-so." But I was, "Hey, dude!" I was that "dude." "What's happenin', dude?" I guess that's what they saw on television. They didn't have the ability to see me as just someone like their own father with the same kind of expectations. I don't think television has helped a hell of a lot. I see newspapers performing the same kind of limited imaging. What's on the front page all the time? Black men in handcuffs. Or some poor welfare mother decides she wants to get a GED. I mean, people graduate from high school all the time; they don't get the frontpage. It's not so laudable it should be on the front page or held up as some outstanding accomplishment. Let's face it - standards are standards. A white guy getting a GED is no big deal; a black person getting a GED is treated as a big deal. And I want to know why. Why? Why should our institutions hold this up as some beacon of recognition? A lot of people who have no experience with black people at all see that as an example of what black people are.

Erik Taylor, 23, white, New Orleans; wrote to The Times-Picayune in February to complain of media discrimination against white people:

You see, blacks have got free rein over the media. They're allowed to say whatever they want. Black comedy shows, "Fresh Prince" - "Oh! Just a typical white boy!" How can they say that on television? And you see black comedians on television. Damon Wayans. One of the funniest guys I've ever seen in my life. One of the funniest men I have ever heard. Blatantly racist against white people, though. He's funny; he just says everything that you can possibly think that makes white people look ridiculous. Have you ever sat down and watched black TV shows? Just the way that they talk about white people, you know, like, "Oh, that's a white thing. Why do you want to be white?" And you're like, how can they say that on television? This is racist, you know? "The Cosby Show" was neutral. It was a family. The family that could live next door to you, where you would have no problem with that family being next door to you if they were black, Oriental, Vietnamese, Middle Eastern, it didn't matter. They were just neutral. They were just, "I'm a person. I'm a doctor, I go to work, and I help sick white people, and I help sick black people." But then again, they have these TV shows that are just like, black power. Black power. Black power. Black power. It's just so uneven that you're just like, I don't want that person living next door to me. Nobody in their right mind would want someone living next door to them that was preaching every day: black power. Black power. Black power. "We're going to take over you white people one day." You know, you'd get scared. Like "Diff'rent Strokes." They were black kids, but you wouldn't know it. They were kids. It was an interracial show that just showed the harmony that people could have between each other. Yet they held their culture, which was important. I think that blacks should hold their culture. But I don't think they should just say that, "Our culture is predominant." They seem to be almost on this hunt, that they're going to convert everybody. I get kind of emotional about it, because this upsets me. Like on "The Facts of Life," they had Tootie on there, she was a black girl living amongst white girls, and the white girls treated her equally, and she treated them equally. I don't have a problem with that. Because in essence, everybody is equal. But I think that the media have that liberal slant to them that's saying, "Black people are better now." Bull. I'm no better than the black person, and he's no better than me.

"People spend as much time with this box in their living room as they do with many family members, and often more time," said University of Massachusetts communications professor Justin Lewis, who is white.

Lewis, who did extensive research into audience reactions to "The Cosby Show," said it's difficult to convince people to take the media's influence seriously because many dismiss it as just entertainment.

"But it's much more than that," he said. "It's as important as the school is for defining the way we think - I mean, more important."

Even so, children will not usually pick up values from the media that conflict with their own family's values, said Judith Myers-Walls, professor of child development and family studies at Purdue University.

"What parents need to be careful of," she said, "are issues that haven't been discussed in the home, race being one common example. If you get no strong messages about race at home, the media will supply them for you."

Black criminal image is a TV news staple

It was the kind of feel-good story TV news directors love. A group of off-duty police officers volunteered their time to take a busload of children from local housing complexes on a weekend camping trip. Television cameras were there for the send-off.

But when WWL broadcast the story on its 6 p.m. newscast May 13, it began not by showing viewers the joyful faces of the children and their parents. It opened instead with stock footage of police officers leading an unidentified, handcuffed black man into a squad car.

The segment was an example of what many experts regard as TV news at its most defamatory. Although criminals represent only a fraction of the total black population, images of black men in handcuffs are a staple of local TV newscasts. Their repetitiveness, even in supposedly positive stories, provokes in many white people a general fear of black men, researchers say.

"There are so many white people who don't come in contact with black people, who only know about black people from what they see on TV," said Kevin McLin, a black assistant professor of mass communications at Dillard University. "If you see all the crime being committed by a certain element, you're scared of that element."

Generic images of black criminals, such as those employed in the WWL feature, can be especially damaging, said Robert Entman, a black associate professor of communications, journalism and political science at Northwestern University in Chicago.

"(That's) implying that the individual identity of the black person is less important - they're all one kind of category of dangerous people," Entman said. "That is the classic essence of prejudiced thinking, the notion that the out group, which you don't like, is sort of a homogeneous bunch of people with bad characteristics."

Television news distorts reality and reinforces negative images of black people by portraying them in an overwhelmingly negative light, studies show.

For example, University of Pennsylvania researcher George Gerbner, in a study titled "Women and Minorities on Television: A Study in Casting and Fate," found that television news portrays black criminals nearly seven times more often than it portrays black business executives.

Entman likewise found that images of black people as criminals predominate local newscasts. And a survey by The Times-Picayune of a week's worth of 6 p.m. news broadcasts on WWL, WDSU and WVUE in May found that, despite the large number of African-American elected officials in New Orleans - including the mayor - black people were more than twice as likely to be featured in stories about crime as about political or community issues. Of total black images, 42.1 percent were crime-related, 18.5 percent issue-related.

The inevitable result of this heavy concentration of black crime news is racial division, said Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a black psychiatry professor at Harvard University and former adviser to "The Cosby Show."

"People are seeing blacks arrested, they're seeing blacks with crack, they're seeing blacks thrown up against cars; they get a really strong crime image of the black community, and that they're dangerous," Poussaint said. "The crime image is seldom counterbalanced by positive images of what's going on. The blacks who are peaceful. The blacks who are not shooting.

"That's what makes the guy in the department store pick up your trail when you're black, because they're associating black with crime and thievery. And for that reason, people will have a real strong feeling . . . of blacks being criminal, and see them on the subway or bus or walking in their neighborhood and immediately think of a mugger or a potential rapist."

Newspapers' racial double standard

Television takes the brunt of criticism for racial stereotyping because it is a visual medium, and pictures leave a far more indelible impression on the subconscious mind than words, psychologists say.

But that's not to say the print media haven't engaged in many forms of racial coding as well.

As a communication professor at Tulane University, Marcia Houston is perhaps more aware of this fact than most people.

"I think newspapers in particular have more of an opportunity to present (more) depth than the sound bites on the evening news," she said, "to help people understand something about the social pathology that creates the crime . . . rather than assuming, as I think a lot of readers do, that (black people) are committing crimes because that's the way they are."

But in April 1992, Houston, who is black, was reminded of an apparent double standard in the way newspapers treat black and white people. She noticed that when a 39-year-old white man was shot and killed while riding his bike in his Mid-City neighborhood, the story received far more prominent attention in The Times-Picayune than most of the murders of black people that occur weekly in the city's housing complexes and low-income neighborhoods.

Houston understands that there were many sound journalistic reasons for playing that particular murder so prominently. She realizes that when residents respond strongly to a particular incident, the paper almost reflexively becomes aggressive in documenting it. But she said those rationalizations don't erase the underlying message the stories conveyed to her: that the loss of a black person's life is less tragic than that of a white person.

"I think there is still some differential treatment of people in that way," Houston said. "It seems to me that it's important for people to know that young black males are being killed by one another at an alarming rate. And it's important to know the numbers of deaths of white people are much smaller - although one, like the guy shot on his bicycle, seems to count more."

Black TV characters still used as comic relief

The producer had grown impatient with Francesca Roberts.

The actress, a New Orleans native who has co-starred in such network series as "Frank's Place" and "Baby Talk," was in final auditions for the lead in a new situation comedy the networks were considering for their fall schedules. The script called for a sassy black woman, and Roberts, a black woman, wasn't acting quite as sassy as the white producer wanted her to be.

"The producer kept saying to me, 'Natural. More natural,' " Roberts said. "Well, I'm as natural as I can get. I'm an educated black woman. I don't do all the head-wagging stuff, and the hand-on-the-hip stuff. That's not who I am and that's not the character I want to do."

MEDIA MANIA: How influential are the media in our everyday lives? Each day the average American spends 8 hours and 52 minutes of total "media time."

Watching television

4 hrs., 9 min.

Listening to radio

3 hrs.

Listening to recorded music

36 min.

Reading a newspaper

28 min.

Reading books

16 min.

Reading magazines

14 min.

Watching videotapes

7 min.

At a movie theater

2 min

Source: Communications Industry Forecast, 1992

In this case and many others, the price she pays is unemployment. Her unwillingness to engage in black buffoonery disqualifies her for many of the roles on network prime-time television.

She would have had no place, for instance, on Fox's "Living Single," which depicts the lives of four African-American career women in New York City. It premiered Aug. 22.

One of the characters is a dimwitted office secretary. Another is obsessed with seducing rich men. Another is a lawyer, although she looked more like an exotic dancer in the first episode, when she strutted into her friends' apartment and proclaimed, "Don't touch me unless you want to get burned!" And another is the editor and publisher of a magazine who suddenly lost her grasp of the English language when a handsome man walked in the door. "Damn!" she said. "He fine!"

"It's really hard for me to play those stereotypical characters," Roberts said. "Offensive is a bit too strong of a word Q it's boring, and I'm tired of it. So in the past few years, I've decided, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to go in there and give them the same old thing over and over again."

Producers and programmers have no problem finding actors who will. Prime time is filled with African-American performers playing variations of a theme - the black character as a provider of comic relief.

That is as true now as it was in the days of "Amos 'n' Andy." The 1993 four-network fall schedule has 12 shows centered on African-American characters. All 12 are comedies. And most of them, such as "Martin," "Hangin' with Mr. Cooper," "Fresh Prince of Bel Air," "Living Single," "In Living Color" and "Family Matters," include the kind of broad, clownish comedy that has long dominated African-American star vehicles in television and film.

"If you look at the content of what's on now, it's horrible," said Brandon Tartikoff, the former NBC programmer who scheduled "The Cosby Show" in 1984. "I can't say it any better than (Bill) Cosby himself said it - you get all these shows from 'drive-by writers,' writers whose only experience with black people is they drove by a black neighborhood once. It's from that that they write.

"It's not people writing from the reality - they're writing from television shows they've seen," said Tartikoff, who is white.

" 'The Cosby Show' happened in the middle of the '80s. It's strange that here we are, almost 10 years to the day of when it was conceived, and television seems like it's back in the '60s and '70s."

Having so many black characters with cartoonish qualities and so few serious, dramatic vehicles to balance them out can have cultural consequences, Harvard's Poussaint said.

"Young kids pick that up as a way of behaving," Poussaint said. "They'll look to television to see what the values should be and how they should behave toward other people - toward women, toward their classmates, toward social crises."

Make-believe creates real-life perceptions

To Dan Quayle, the choice was obvious. Things were heating up in the 1992 presidential campaign, and the vice president wanted a high-profile person to serve as an example of America's supposedly declining family values.

He picked Murphy Brown.

It didn't matter to Quayle, or apparently to a lot of voters, that Murphy was a fictional character. Although he was ridiculed in some quarters for discussing her pregnancy as if actress Candice Bergen herself were having the baby, Quayle was merely doing what everyone does, even if they think they don't: discussing fictional TV characters as though they are real.

It is that inability to keep separate our real-life experiences and those we experience through the media that makes racial stereotyping so insidious, researchers say.

"There's a very strange way people have of talking about TV fiction," said Lewis of the University of Massachusetts. "On the one hand they know it's not real, but at other moments they forget that and will draw upon what they learned from TV Q without remembering that's where they got it Q to talk about the world."

Lewis said it is impossible to, as he put it, "perch inside people's brains and watch ideas and opinions forming." But in an effort to better understand how black, white and Hispanic audiences interpret TV images and issues of race and class, he and fellow communications professor Sut Jhally, who is black, showed an episode of "The Cosby Show" to 52 focus groups in Springfield, Mass., and analyzed the reactions of the viewers.

Their conclusion, which was published in a 1992 book, "Enlightened Racism: 'The Cosby Show,' Audiences and the Myth of the American Dream," is that people not only trust TV images, they trust them as much as real life. The book tells of a middle-class black woman who told the researchers, "I think (Clair Huxtable) is nice. She's patient. Sometimes I wish (my mother) would be patient."

This person saw Clair Huxtable, a character played by actress Phylicia Rashad, as simultaneously unreal and real. Her awareness that the program was fictional did not stop her from comparing its make-believe mother to her real-life parent. It altered, however slightly, her perception of her own world.

"I think Dan Quayle was quite right to say OK, she's not real, but images matter, fictional characters matter," Lewis said. "They do influence the way we think."

That may partially explain why someone like Erik Taylor, who considered an African-American boy to be among his closest childhood friends, now freezes at the sight of an angry black man in his rear-view mirror.

It also may help to explain how someone like Tamiko Allen could admire her mother as a child and still long to be as white as Marcia Brady.